I had an email the other day asking my permission for a presentation I gave at a conference in 2000 to be archived in an institutional repository at Washington State University; my small contribution was a paen to Vetgate, the animal health gateway built by the OMNI/BIOME project, and still going strong under Intute. WSU Libraries are developing a community for the Proceedings of the International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS) in the WSU Research Exchange, their institutional repository, to preserve these proceedings publicly and so that each paper will have a durable link for citing.
This is an excellent development. The Third ICAHIS took place in London in 2000, as a stream within the eight International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML). I\d previously attended the 2nd ICAHIS in Copenhagen. Since then they've held conferences in Budapest and Pretoria.
In 2000, one of the reasons for ICAHIS being a stream within with ICML was that ICML would archive the proceedings, but the archives haven't been available for several years now. Perhaps institutional repositories offer a more secure and durable way of preserving such records.
